Auction House Plans To Conduct A Digital Art Auction
What’s the Latest Development?
Auction house Phillips has announced that it will work with Tumblr to hold its first-ever digital art auction event early next month. Titled “Paddles ON!” the featured works will be auctioned off both online and in a live venue, and some will be displayed at Phillips’ gallery space in New York City. Eighty percent of proceeds from the auction will go to the artists themselves, and the remainder will go to Rhizome, a nonprofit organization that promotes and preserves contemporary digital art.
What’s the Big Idea?
The Phillips/Tumblr project isn’t the first to attempt to sell original digital artwork; innovators have been putting prices on such works for years. Another upcoming art show, Net Worth, “will sell forgeries of net art created by other artists and sold via [Bitcoin]” to demonstrate differences between physical and digital art markets. Considering the many different kinds of art floating around online, it may seem hard to define what it means to actually own a work. According to Alex Chung, co-founder of GIF hosting site Giphy, “[T]he same established [copyright] rules of photography cover that of digital art…They all fall under copyright law, just physical art is harder to replicate versus photography or digital art.”
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